


The Lamb and The Knife

by openhearts



Category: Make It or Break It
Genre: F/M, episode: I Won't Dance Don't Ask Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-16
Updated: 2010-11-16
Packaged: 2019-07-29 09:57:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16261850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: Once she looks over to ask him something and he’s already looking at her, his mouth caught in half a smile.She feels her lungs tighten like she’s just run a mile, and she’s returning the grin.





	The Lamb and The Knife

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Livejournal on 11/16/2010.

The first time it happens it’s so quick, so seamless, that she almost doesn’t notice the newness. 

Sasha stands at the edge of the mat, feet spread in a comfortably wide stance, hips jutting forward the slightest bit, arms folded over his chest. The neckline of his t-shirt – a watery gray-green color – lies over his collarbone and the sleeves wrinkle tightly over the contours of his arms. The muscles are defined, but softer than the younger male gymnasts she trains with. He seems distracted; he frowns out over the floor routine space. 

Payson just looks at him for a moment, and sees all this, down to the twitch of his mouth before he opens it to speak. She rests her hands on her hips and listens to his instructions.

_

 

In the audience they sit shoulder to shoulder, and he leans in now and then and whispers something. She feels his breath on her cheek and neck; when she looks back at him she can count the short stubbly hairs on his chin. 

Once she looks over to ask him something and he’s already looking at her, his mouth caught in half a smile.

She feels her lungs tighten like she’s just run a mile, and she’s returning the grin.

The lights come up in the house and the crowd applauds.

_

 

Payson stumbles on the stairs outside the hall, stiletto heels scrabbling over concrete. 

Her body reacts with panic before her mind can; she feels a quickening in the muscles of her back, tensing and squeezing to protect her spine, throwing her further off balance. Before she fully realizes it her hand closes around Sasha’s arm to steady herself.

He’s stopped and turned into her, and they’re in each other’s space on the steps in the midst of the crowd leaving the ballet, her head tipped toward his shoulder and their arms locked together as she grips his forearm and he stands with his feet spread between two steps with one hand on her elbow and the other on her waist.

“Whoa, are you alright?” he asks. Her cheeks burn and she ducks her head.

“Yeah, fine. Stupid girly shoes,” she lets go of him and motions to her shoe. Sasha glances down.

Time stutters when she’s suddenly aware he’s still touching her, still holding her elbow and her waist and he’s looking at her legs. A surge of something, something foreign and prideful comes over her and she shifts slightly, her ankles still feeling wobbly caged in the straps of her shoes. The dress is short.

Sasha raises his head and smiles, pivots easily and folds her hand over his arm and leaves his resting over her fingers securely. Payson swallows, her mouth dry. The glimmer in his eye trails repeatedly across her vision and her palm sweats against his sleeve. His hand is warm over hers.

“Can’t have my future Olympian falling down stairs,” he admonishes jokingly, and they begin to take the next steps.

_

 

She gasps a little, eyes wide, and licks her lips. Sasha laughs. 

“Want to stop?”

She shakes her head after a pause, half to rouse herself from the briefest of daydreams, half to refuse the offer.

“Oh, come now,” he chides her, “no one has to know.”

Her gaze snaps over to him, a scandalized smile glinting in her eyes. Sasha raises his eyebrows and there is a smile she’s never seen before on his mouth. She blinks into the light of it, can’t focus for a moment on anything but how even his teeth are and the way his lips curve, dangerous with promises. She shakes her head again, slower and less sure.

Sasha flicks the turn signal on and does a u-turn at the stop light.

“A little ice cream never hurt anyone, Payson.” 

He smiles at her again from the corner of his eye as he turns into the parking lot. He parks easily and hops out of the car, jogging around to the passenger side before Payson even has her seatbelt all the way off, her hands shaking. In the few seconds she has alone in the car she tries to reel herself in, tries to calm her breathing and eradicate the frantic twists in her stomach. She concentrates on the stillness, brief as it is. She hears a drip from the engine, the sound of her own inhalation, watches Sasha’s long strides around the front of the truck, the tilt of his shoulders as he rounds the corner and takes the last two steps to her door.

A cold choking thrill rattles up her throat as the inner workings of the door handle click and shift together.

He reaches out a hand. 

“Come on, I think they’re almost closing.” 

He holds her hand as they step over the concrete parking spot partition, and doesn’t let go until he’s led her ahead of him and held the door for her with a deep bow. Payson is distracted by the heady smell of cream and sugar as she steps into the shop and just stands there a moment, savoring some of the decadence she usually denies herself while in training. After a moment Sasha’s fingers brush against her waist, urging her forward to the counter to order.

“Whatever you like. My treat,” he says over her shoulder. 

She shivers, and mentally blames it on the chill coming from the cooler.

_

 

“Cold?” Sasha asks around a mouthful of white chocolate raspberry. 

He sets down his ice cream and shrugs out of his jacket and a moment later she’s enveloped in rich warm fabric. She’d never even seen him in a suit before this night and now his jacket is resting over her bare arms, seeming to breathe out his body heat against her skin. 

He picks up the cardboard cup again and rests his forearms on his thighs, looks out at the night as he brings another spoonful of ice cream to his mouth. Payson copies him with her elbows resting on her demurely pressed-together knees and they taste cold heavy sweetness at the same time.

She studies the angle of his jaw, how his hair brushes around the curve of his ear. His throat undulates as he swallows, and he reaches up with one hand to loosen his tie and work the top button of his dress shirt free, the plastic spoon held casually between his lips. 

When his eyes slide over and see her staring she can’t look away, caught and frozen under his attention. She swallows thickly and forces herself to speak, give an answer to his slightly raised eyebrows.

“Do you think-” she starts haltingly, and she has to look down at her own cardboard cup and draw her spoon across the bottom, scraping through the filmy layer of ice cream on the bottom –milk chocolate with a marshmallow swirl. “Sasha I don’t know if I can do this. This, graceful thing. It’s not me.”

“I know you can do this, Payson. You just have to find your rhythm.”

“My rhythm? It’s not – I can’t dance. I’m a gymnast,” she reminds him. She’s beginning to sound like a broken record, but he just won’t listen lately. 

Sasha doesn’t answer, just gives her a reassuring look that she draws no reassurance from.

He sets his cup down, stands up from the table and takes hers from her hands and sets it down as well. A drip of chocolate from the rim of the cup transfers to his thumb and he licks it off before clapping his hands together and holding them out to her. She stares back at him, at the feeble light from the streetlamp falling over his shoulders to touch the tips of blades of grass dampened by the sprinklers.

“What?” she asks eloquently, and he gestures impatiently until she slides his jacket off her shoulders, lining slipping smoothly over her arms, and stands up, stepping gingerly down from the bench. Sasha glances at her shoes and motions for her to sit again, and when she does he kneels and takes her ankle gently in one hand to unbuckle the strap and slide her shoe off her foot. 

Payson sits utterly still with her hands wedged against the bench on either side of her even as she itches to reach down and touch his hair, as she feels her mouth watering. His dress shirt wrinkles over his shoulders, his fingertips brush lightly against her skin. He looks up at her.

She feels cool rough concrete against her toes and worn battered wood under her palms. Her dress is tight over her lap and there’s a gap where the material pulls taut and her thighs slope away and he could look but he’s not. He could look, she thinks, and see, but he’s looking at her eyes, into them and past them and she’s never felt so invisible and so studied at the same time.

He’s seen her in less than this dress, in outfits more revealing every day of the week, and it’s so normal that she’d begun to forget her body could be anything but an instrument. Halting her training had softened her, and she’d waited still and helpless as curves unfurled themselves over her previously familiar frame. 

She’d begun to feel it when she walked, this new flesh moving with her. It wasn’t that she gained much weight, because she lost muscle mass from the lack of conditioning, but even as scale numbers stayed the same she knew they were lying. Her body was changing around her, without her. But no matter how long she spent staring at herself in the mirror, trying to decipher how to make it all go back the way it was it was useless. 

When she licks her lips, Sasha glances down to her mouth. A single beat of impossible silence follows.

He stands in a fluid motion and holds his hand out again and there’s something, something in his expression that Payson can’t approach. Heat and confusion and focus, focus, focus, and she feels it. 

She takes his hand and stands and lets him lead her out onto the grass. She shivers again when the cold wet blades tickle her feet.

“You’re so jumpy,” he says. He sounds almost normal, familiar – a little crabby, not soft but not harsh – for a moment. 

Then he draws her in close, slides an arm around her until his fingers touch naked skin on her back, and he speaks the next word against her temple, low in his throat and she can’t be imagining all this, can’t be making up the energy and the quiet and how close he’s holding her and his mouth brushing over her forehead and, 

“Relax,” he orders gently.

Her shoulders slacken into his hold and her weight settles more squarely onto her feet, planted in the grass between his shiny black dress shoes. 

“Follow my lead.”

She nods without reservation. Her heart slams out against her ribcage so fast and so hard that it hurts. Her hands tighten, on his shoulder and held within his other hand and he squeezes back slightly. 

He nods, and begins to count, “One, two, three, one, two, three,” and leads her into a waltz.

Payson watches her feet and tries to count in her head, tries to keep track of the rhythm and balance and push out the thoughts of Sasha as anything other than her coach, the non-man she’d been spending her days with for months.

“Look up,” he tells her, and when she does, all is lost. 

She catches his gaze and holds it and then there’s nothing but him, his face with shadows painting over it as they dance, as they begin to pick up speed and whirl in wider circles across the grass. Her breath picks up, deeper and faster, and she still counts under her breath. Her steps lag behind his here and there but his fingers curl against her skin and he nods as he leads her. 

It’s unfamiliar, following like this; gymnastics is about her own body, her own strengths and limitations and pacing. She doesn’t understand what she’s supposed to be learning.

Sasha begins to slow their pace and she follows competently enough, and smiles ghost across their faces when they realize they’re finally synchronized.

Then they’re slowing, swaying in smaller circles, and it may be a few moments after they actually stop that she realizes they’re standing still and his arms are around hers and his hands are holding her waist, his fingers flexing open and shut. 

He leans in swiftly, at least it feels fast, but he could be barely moving quickly enough to perceive it because she can’t keep up with his motion even though every pump of blood through her veins measures another inch of space between them demolished.

Payson sucks in a shocked breath, and he aborts the motion, veering to one side and pausing before his chin brushes over her temple just barely. 

She can hardly breathe, hardly feel anything around the shock of what she thinks might have just happened. She leans into him and slides her hands slowly down from his shoulders to his chest – just to feel him and test that he’s really there. He’s warm and solid underneath the crisp cotton of his shirt. He’s there, it’s him, but this is someone she doesn’t know.

“Pay,” he whispers with a rough voice, and it he just sounds so conflicted and strained and she can’t stand it. She shushes him, turns her face up to his and fists her hands in his shirt. Without her heels she has to reach up on her tip toes but she can’t have come this far and just remain hanging there. She can’t stand there at almost and not know, not plow through the gray area. Payson isn’t a gray area person, isn’t a middle-of-the-road anything. She kisses him.

As she pulls him in – his eyes are open; he watches her as he leans in at the rate her hands bring him – she wants to smile. For the thrill of it, of being not on the brink, not toeing a line, but sprinting past it, falling beyond the pale into something that makes her feel violently frightened at the same time that Sasha’s arms slip further around her, holding her closer and tighter. Then she can’t even imagine fear, because this is the man who protects her, who studies her strengths and shadows her through her weaknesses.

She feels his resistance even as he holds her to his chest; a noise urgent and pained spills from his mouth against hers and it spurs her to open her lips under his, to slide her tongue forward experimentally, because before this is over she wants to taste him. Somehow that will make it more real. 

Her hands slide up until her fingertips just brush his hairline behind his ears and he makes another sound, one that startles her because she feels it like a ribbon of heat through her stomach and his hands are clutching at her hips and wrinkling her dress and he’s kissing her back. 

Now it is terrifying. 

Now he is not still, not the tall dark presence she can push at and study and feel without consequence. His tongue slides over hers, and the taste of him and ice cream and heated breath overwhelms her, floods her, and she clings to him tighter.

Given how few times she’s done this, she should be passive, letting him take the lead and guide her gently through it, but Payson wars with him, demanding and insistent. She can feel herself getting too eager, moving too quickly, and part of her instinctually knows she should slow down, draw back, let things deescalate on their own – as if there’s a right way to act with his body so tense and the air thrumming deafeningly around them – but then he’s sucking on her lower lip and one of his hands has slid up to rest at the side of her neck and his skin is hot against hers, his thumb sliding back and forth just beneath her jaw. 

He slows her down, lightens the pressure until he brushes one more barely-there kiss over her parted lips. When she opens her eyes he stares down at her, and he looks so startled and struck that she reaches up to wrap her fingers around his wrist. For a split second she doesn’t know who’s comforting who, which of them is more confused and overwhelmed. 

She ducks her head, trying to collect a thought, trying to figure out what just happened and what it means. She can’t think of anything to say; she only knows he can’t leave her here, and somehow her mind just latches on to the fact that he’ll have to drive her home and they will sit in his truck in her driveway until she says goodnight. 

If the lights are off inside the house, meaning they’re safe from observation, she will find a way to kiss him again.


End file.
